What if you could walk through your Malibu dream home before it’s built? Sounds insane right? Well companies like Virtual Walkthrough are making this possible now. A virtual tour is a simulation of an existing location, usually composed of a sequence of videos or still images. It may also use other multimedia elements such as sound effects, music, narration, and text. Implementing this into the design build process during schematic design phase can reach buyers on social media, mobile devices and over email with a more compelling buying experience, and one that is connected in real-time to every single seller regardless of where they are in the world. A few ways virtual tours benefit the residential industry are:

1) Quality Imagery

Shooting in the highest quality resolution for the industry.

2) Setting the Correct Expectations

Convince more of these buyers to do a viewing because they know what to expect when they get there. Traditional photos that have skewed perspectives, too much contrast, and too little quality or are highly post-processed make buyers hesitate because they know intuitively the photos are not realistic – making them less likely to visit.

3) Full Transparency, Qualified Leads

Honesty and transparency simply gets more real buyers willing to invest their time to view a house. The end result is that we get more qualified leads through the door.

4) Reaching a larger audience of buyers

More buyers from a wider geographic radius who typically would not be willing to travel for a viewing will physically visit or bid on a house they’ve toured with Virtual Walkthrough because they know that what they see is what they will get.

5) Creating Bidding Wars

80% of homebuyers preview houses online. The more elaborate and detailed the previews are, the greater the interest. Media drives interest so high that it has been shown to raise final sales, and in our first ever-measured trial it drove the average house price up by 15%.

This new technology can convince the indecisive buyer to move into a beautiful Malibu home and can see and walk through the design before its built and change what he decides unfavorable. Virtual tours are truly a game-changing technology that really addresses the industry’s need and further show what great scenic and architectural design scenery Malibu can offer. Correlating this to all phases of design can give the owner what they want and works well with the design build process.